^ The sect called the Quietists, who flourished in the seven- teenth century, and who taught that God came closest to the soul when it simply waited for Him, and did not actively search for Him, may have too exclusively chosen the Psalmist's line for their motto, and its spirit as their guide in the religious life. But there is a sense in which we must all be Quietists, and rest from thinking and working that God may come to us in our dreams. To cherish such a belief, to feel that everything does not depend on us, far from being a hindrance to work, a tempta- tion to spiritual idleness, is just the one thing which can enable us to do our work efficiently, because it enables us to do it without worry and over-anxiety.^ ^ H. Lewis, Modem RcUimalism, 103. * E. B. Speirs, A Present Advent, 290.
PSALM cxxvii. 2 105
^ God gives to many of us in our waking state, but not to the highest, not to the best beloved. Talent is got by waking, but not genius. Genius is like the nightingale — unconscious of the beauty of its own song. Even so is there a genius of the spirit. There are souls that win their virtue in the school of stern experi- ence ; God gives to them in waking. But there are others, like the garden of Eden, who need not a man to till the ground. They yield their fruit spontaneously. They are beautiful, not because they ought, but because they must. They can no more help being kind than the bee can help making its hive. They are not under the law, but under grace, and so they do everything, not legally, but gracefully. The flowers of their hearts are wild flowers ; God alone has tended them ; they have bloomed in the light of His smile ; they have called no man master. These are they to whom the Father giveth in sleep.^
III.
Giving by Sleep.
1. A Godlike boon it is that frees us from our drudgery, heals our weariness, lifts our anxiety, and blinds us to the morrow. It is a blessed thing to be thus saved, even for a little while, from ourselves. But the night draws to dawn, and the gift of sleep is spent, and the old life claims the man anew. Now is it that he finds the gifts which God brings by sleep. He faces life with these in hand, and faces it therefore with new courage and vigour. His body has been strengthened, his mind cleared, his heart nerved, his will re-strung.
Wonderful is the work of repair in life that goes on while we sleep. Men bring the great ships to dock after they have ploughed the waves or battled with the storms and are battered and strained and damaged, and there they are repaired and made ready to go to sea again. At night our jaded and exhausted bodies are dry-docked after the day's conflict and toils, and while we sleep the mysterious process of restoration and reinvigoration goes on ; and when morning comes we are ready to begin a new day of toil and care. We lie down tired, feeling sometimes that we can never do another day's work; but the morning comes
^ G. Matheson, Searehings in the Silence, 101,
io6 THE GIFTS OF SLEEP
again, and we rise renewed in body and spirit, full of enthusiasm, and strong and brave for the hardest duties.
^ The author of The Mystery of Sleep, Dr. John Bigelow, is not satisfied with the ordinary answer, that we sleep in order that we may rest and repair the waste tissues. He does not believe that that is a satisfactory answer to the question as to why we are compelled to sleep one hour out of three, eight hours out of every twenty-four, four months out of every year, and twenty-three years out of every threescore years and ten. He seriously assails this position by asserting that we do not rest when we sleep in any sense in which we do not rest when awake. He pertinently asks: "What faculty of the spiritual or the physical nature of man is in repose during sleep ? What single function or energy of the body is then absolutely suspended ? Certainly not our hearts, which do not enjoy a moment's rest from the hour of our birth to our decease. The heart is always engaged in the effort to send our blood, latent with vital energy, through every vein, artery, and tissue of our bodies." And so he goes on, taking up various organs of the human frame, and shows that nothing rests while we sleep.
He goes on to say that the great purpose of sleep is to dis- sociate us periodically from the world in which we live, and in a sense to regenerate us morally and spiritually. To his mind, we have in sleep conditions which are in harmony with one of the supreme behests of a Christian life — utter deliverance from the domination of the phenomenal world; entire emancipation, for these few sleeping hours, from the cares and ambitions of the life into which we were born, and to the indulgence of which we are inclined by nature to surrender the service of all our vital energies. If it be a good thing to live above the world, to regard our earthly life as transitory, as designed to educate us for a more elevated existence, to serve us as a means, not an end, then we have in sleep, apparently, an ally and coadjutor — at least, to the extent of delivering us for several hours every day from a servile dependence upon what ought to be a good slave, but is always a bad master.^